Early Wednesday morning, as Donald Trump declared victory, he invited Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White onstage during his speech. “This is what happens when the machine comes after you,” White boomed, sounding like he was teeing up a cage match. “This is karma, ladies and gentlemen!”
Why exactly, on the eve of one of the biggest political comebacks in American history, was the man responsible for mainlining mixed martial arts to the mainstream given top billing?
After congratulating Trump and his family, White gave a shout-out to a motley crew of men: Twitch streamer Adin Ross, the YouTube collective called Nelk Boys, plus podcasters Theo Von and Joe Rogan—all media that either Trump or J.D. Vance appeared on this election season. With the exception of Rogan, these names might be unfamiliar to many Americans, but not young American men.
None of these podcasts or streams are inherently political, and neither is the UFC. They are not right-wing media, in any traditional sense of the word. They are, though, the young male mainstream, representing a large but silent minority—one ignored by politicians at best and demonized at worst.
Each program in this system differs a bit: The Nelk Boys started out as a prank show on YouTube, Adin Ross plays video games, and Von has a successful stand-up career. Rogan is rather thoughtful, while Ross and the Nelk Boys are more interested in making the audience laugh. The Barstool Media Universe, presided over by Dave Portnoy, has a loose sports focus. What they all have in common though is that they involve men talking, mostly to other men, off the cuff. The audience doesn’t view them as journalists or thought leaders, but rather as para-social friends. They have natural, long-winded conversations that could go anywhere. It’s like hanging out—in a way.
I’m a 28-year-old man, and it’s virtually impossible to not encounter this media ecosystem, particularly if you’re online, whether through YouTube’s suggestion algorithm or as clips on TikTok. The fact that most streamers comment on the news, but don’t focus on it incessantly, is a reprieve from the 24-hour news cycle.
Several months ago, left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker went on the liberal podcast Pod Save America. Twitch is a video platform where people stream themselves for hours, often while playing video games, and Piker is one of the most popular streamers there. He admitted on the podcast that his program was an outlier when it comes to politics. “If you’re a dude under 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever—playing video games, working out, listening to a history podcast or whatever—[it] is completely dominated by center-right to Trumpian right-wing politics.”
That shouldn’t be a shock. Increasingly, every male interest, from going to the gym, apparently a fascist recruiting ground, to playing video games is decried as right-wing by the left. If you tell young men that everything they like is right wing, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start to believe you. The Democrats seemed to have known this was a problem, going so far as to host a “White Dudes for Harris” event this July in an explicit effort to reach out to a demographic the party has been hemorrhaging for decades. The first speaker was a black guy.
Later, the Harris campaign tried to break into the Twitch ecosystem, forcing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tim Walz to play video games together on the streaming platform. In a cringe mimicry of what an actual Twitch stream looks like, the two politicians woodenly recited Democratic talking points about Project 2025 while playing Madden NFL, a football video game. Less than 300,000 people tuned in. For context, Von’s podcast with J.D. Vance had more than 4.5 million views on YouTube alone.
What the Democrats didn’t do was actually engage with men in their own spaces—Rogan’s Austin studio where he smokes cigars, the Nelk Club House surrounded by beer, a chair opposite a Dale Earnhardt jacket-clad Von. The Trump campaign did, and to great effect, getting 54 percent of the male vote and massively improving his support among men ages 18 to 29 (a six-point improvement over 2020) and among Hispanic men, from 36 percent in 2020 to 54 percent on Tuesday.
It’s not just that the Trump campaign bothered to show up on male-centric platforms, it’s that they respected the mediums and participated in them fully. Both Trump and Vance went to Rogan’s studio in Texas to sit for a three-hour, winding conversation—the norm on his show. After being invited to The Joe Rogan Experience, Harris’s campaign offered Rogan an hour and demanded he travel to her to conduct it. He refused, and rightfully so. An hourlong interview in a random location is not the Experience.
Harris’s refusal to go on Rogan, on his terms, might very well be the equivalent of Hillary Clinton not going to Wisconsin in 2016. Harris’s unwillingness to sit for a three-hour podcast with Rogan speaks to an extreme lack of confidence in her ability to speak in anything but scripted sound bites. The interview would have probably gone better than they expected, as Rogan has a knack for making his guests feel relaxed, even if he disagrees with them, and Harris could have at least attempted to reach Rogan’s largely male audience. Perhaps she is truly incapable of speaking off the cuff—now we’ll never know. But in hindsight, what the hell did she have to lose?
In their appearances, both Vance and Trump always seemed casual and relaxed, letting conversations wax and wane. Viewers got to see a side of the candidates that they never would have in a tight segment on 60 Minutes or a quick hit between reverse-mortgage commercials on Fox News.
Von, a recovering addict, got Trump to speak sincerely about his brother’s struggles with alcoholism, as well as his thoughts on boxing. It didn’t feel like an interview with the president. It felt like an episode on the Theo Von show—a sign of respect for both the comedian and his young male audience.
The coming weeks will be filled with all sorts of attempts to explain why Trump won the election. Here’s mine: He was the only candidate willing to meet men where they are, whether that be at a UFC match, a Twitch stream, or at the “fascist” gym listening to Joe Rogan on their AirPods.
River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow him on X @River_Is_Nice, and read his piece “The Smearing of Gay Republicans.”
To read Madeleine Kearns’s piece on how Democrats gambled on the wrong women’s rights issue, click here.
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